Twitter Goes Down, Again! [Update: Service Returning to Normal]

You must have already noticed that Twitter is currently inaccessible and you are seeing the message — “Twitter is currently down for” when you visit the site via your browser. When we tried accessing the website on Google Chrome, we received an error message as follows –

As you can see from the above screenshot, Twitter wasn’t loading properly. The images are missing and the message contains some funny characters Ruby on Rails markups.

Users checked if Twitter was down using the service downforeveryoneorjustme.com, and many users are unable to reach the site. Twitter is aware of the issue and is currently looking in to it. At the time of writing this post, Twitter issued a statement stating, “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.”

This is second time Twitter is experiencing this problem in the last two months. Last time in June, the company stated that the site was down due to a “cascaded bug.”

Update #1: It appears that mobile version of Twitter is also down, and users are receiving the message “Twitter Error” when trying to access their tweets from Twitter apps and the mobile site mobile.twitter.com. There seems to be a huge problem that Twitter is facing.

Update #2: Users are unable to access their tweets from the last one hour. Here’s a Twitter status information graph by DownRightNow

Update #3: Twitter is back! It looks like service is returning to normal.

The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centers. Data centers are designed to be redundant: when one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time.

I wish I could say that today’s outage could be explained by the Olympics or even acascading bug. Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy. We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future.

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Joel Fernandes

Joel Fernandes (G+) is a tech enthusiast and a social media blogger. During his leisure time, he enjoys taking photographs, and photography is one of his most loved hobbies. You can find some of his photos on Flickr.He does a little of web coding, and maintains a tech blog of his own - Techo Latte.Joel is currently pursuing his Masters in Computer Application from Bangalore, India. You can get in touch with him on Twitter - @joelfernandes, or visit his Facebook Profile for more information. View all posts by Joel Fernandes